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Question Mark
The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation, punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History The history of the question mark is contested. One popular theory posits that the shape of the symbol is inspired by the crook in a cat's tail, often attributed to the ancient Egyptians. However, Egyption hieroglyphics did not utilize punctuation marks. In the fifth century, Classical Syriac, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the ''zagwa elaya'' ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question. From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a . According to some palaeography, paleographers, it may have indi ...
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Inverted Question Mark
The upside-down (also inverted, turned or rotated) question mark and exclamation mark are punctuation marks used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences or clauses in Spanish and some languages that have cultural ties with Spain, such as Asturian and Waray. The initial marks are mirrored at the end of the sentence or clause by the ordinary question mark, , or exclamation mark, . Upside-down marks are supported by various standards, including ISO-8859-1, Unicode, and HTML. They can be entered directly on keyboards designed for Spanish-speaking countries. Usage The upside-down question mark is written before the first letter of an interrogative sentence or clause to indicate that a question follows. It is a rotated form of the standard symbol "?" recognized by speakers of other languages written with the Latin script. A regular question mark is written at the end of the sentence or clause. Upside-down punctuation is especially critical in Spanish since the synt ...
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Typographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature and the letters and are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, and are often merged to create (where the tittle on the merges with the hood of the ); the same is true of and to create . The common ampersand, , developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters and (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient manuscripts. These new glyphs emerge alongside the p ...
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Stanley Elkin
Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships. Biography Elkin was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner. During this period he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. During his career, Elk ...
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Question Comma
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis. In rare cases, the me ...
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Full Stop
The full stop ( Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation). A full stop is frequently used at the end of word abbreviations—in British usage, primarily truncations like ''Rev.'', but not after contractions like '' Revd''; in American English, it is used in both cases. It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g., "U.S."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO"). When used in a series (typically of three, an ellipsis) the mark is also used to indicate omitted words. In the English-speaking world, a punctuation mark identical to the full stop is used as the d ...
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John Florio
Giovanni Florio (1552 or 1553 – 1625), known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England. Florio contributed 1,149 words to the English language, placing third after Chaucer (with 2,012 words) and Shakespeare (with 1,969 words), in the linguistic analysis conducted by Stanford professor John Willinsky. Florio was the first translator of Montaigne into English, possibly the first translator of Boccaccio into English and he wrote the first comprehensive Italian–English dictionary (surpassing the only previous modest Italian–English dictionary by William Thomas published in 1550). Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was a personal friend, and Jonson hailed Florio as "loving father" and "ayde of his muses". Philosopher Giordano Bruno was also a personal friend; Florio met the Italian philosopher in London, while both ...
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Italian Language
Italian (, , or , ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. It evolved from the colloquial Latin of the Roman Empire. Italian is the least divergent language from Latin, together with Sardinian language, Sardinian. It is spoken by about 68 million people, including 64 million native speakers as of 2024. Italian is an official language in Languages of Italy, Italy, Languages of San Marino, San Marino, Languages of Switzerland, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and Languages of Vatican City, Vatican City; it has official Minority language, minority status in Minority languages of Croatia, Croatia, Slovene Istria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the municipalities of Santa Teresa, Espírito Santo, Santa Tereza, Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, Encantado, and Venda Nova do Imigrante in Languages of Brazil#Language co-officialization, Brazil. Italian is also spoken by large Italian diaspora, immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Austral ...
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Venice
Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are linked by 438 bridges. The islands are in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay lying between the mouths of the Po River, Po and the Piave River, Piave rivers (more exactly between the Brenta (river), Brenta and the Sile (river), Sile). As of 2025, 249,466 people resided in greater Venice or the Comune of Venice, of whom about 51,000 live in the historical island city of Venice (''centro storico'') and the rest on the mainland (''terraferma''). Together with the cities of Padua, Italy, Padua and Treviso, Italy, Treviso, Venice is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), which is considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million. The name is derived from the ancient Adr ...
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Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius (; ; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and Renaissance humanism, humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his ''enchiridia'', which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon. Manutius wanted to produce Greek language, Greek texts for his readers because he believed that works by Aristotle or Aristophanes in their original Greek form were pure and unadulterated by translation. Before Manutius, publishers rarely printed volumes in Greek, mainly due to the complexity of providing a standardized Greek typeface. Manutius published rare manuscripts ...
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Interrogative
An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence (linguistics), sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its Declarative sentence, declarative counterpart "Hannah is sick". Also, the additional question mark closing the statement assures that the reader is informed of the interrogative mood. Interrogative clauses may sometimes be embedded within a phrase, for example: "Paul knows who is sick", where the interrogative clause "who is sick" serves as complement (linguistics), complement of the embedding verb "know". Languages vary in how they form interrogatives. When a language has a dedicated interrogative inflectional form, it is often referred to as interrogative grammatical mood. Interrogative mood or other interrogative forms may be denoted by the list of glossing abbreviations, glossing abbreviation . Question types Interrogative sentences are generally ...
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University
A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Universities typically offer both undergraduate education, undergraduate and postgraduate education, postgraduate programs. The first universities in Europe were established by Catholic Church, Catholic monks. The University of Bologna (), Italy, which was founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: *being a high degree-awarding institute. *using the word (which was coined at its foundation). *having independence from the ecclesiastic schools and issuing secular as well as non-secular degrees (with teaching conducted by both clergy and non-clergy): grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law and notarial law.Hunt Janin: "The university in medieval life, 1179–1499", McFarland, 2 ...
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Punctus Interrogativus From Bern, Bürgerbibliothek Cod
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes Space (punctuation), space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and e ...
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